A perfect storm is threatening Britain’s pubs – and even the very best venues aren’t safe
As one of our ‘500 Best Pubs in England’ is forced to close, landlords fear they could be next
The Bartons Arms is perhaps England’s most beautiful pub. With its mahogany panelling, Minton Hollins tiles and lavishly adorned staircase, this huge Birmingham pub would be world famous were it in London’s West End.
In truth, there are only two or three pubs in the whole of England that come close to its late Victorian splendour, which is why it was one of the first places I chose when compiling The Telegraph’s 500 Best Pubs in England.
And now it’s shut. The doors closed in August. On social media, staff blamed “an increasingly harsh and unforgiving climate” and “rising costs” for the pub’s demise. And while there are clearly other factors at play – the pub has closed repeatedly over the past few decades, and it sits next to perhaps England’s least appealing thoroughfare – there will be plenty of publicans sympathising with these sentiments.
Take Matthew Todd, landlord of The Wonston Arms, my pick for best pub in Hampshire, who recently wrote in this paper about how changes in the last budget to National Insurance, minimum wage and business rates relief have harmed his business.
“Every single landlord I speak to is now saying that costs are unbearable,” he wrote. “And the worst thing is that we can’t say everything is going to be alright next weekend, or the weekend after that.”
Falling sales and rising costs
Plenty of other award-winning publicans are suffering, too. Some people believe that only bad pubs close, but that’s simply not true. Many pubs in my guide to England’s best are finding the going tougher than ever.
Pubs like The Swan and Railway in Wigan and The Woodman in Birmingham, both of which are run by John Brearley. The budget has had a stark impact on his business.
“My pubs turn over about £1m a year,” he says. “Last year, before the changes came in, we were running at a profit. Now, we’re a marginally loss-making business.”
Brearley has invested about £1.5m into his business over the past few years. “I love genuinely traditional pubs, that’s my USP, but I’m not doing this because I’ve got stupid amounts of money, and I’m not doing it for a vanity project,” he adds.
“It’s got to wash its face – but if I’d been just a businessman coming along, I wouldn’t have invested what I have.”
What’s particularly depressing is that, based on cultural trends, these should be good times for high-quality pubs.
Thanks to entrepreneurs like Brearley and young customers swept into old-school pubs on the back of the post-Covid Guinness surge, classic pubs are back in fashion again.
The economic situation, though, threatens to smother this renaissance.
Pubs, of course, have been declining for decades – both in terms of numbers (although perhaps not in terms of pure square footage, as Brearley points out: you could fit plenty of traditional street-corner pubs into the average Wetherspoons) and social significance.
Driven by the cheapness of supermarket brews, Britons now do most of their beer-drinking at home, for the first time in our history. Equally, the budget’s impact might not be so disastrous were it not for the malign legacy of what came before.
Put simply, British pay packets are no bigger than they were 15 years’ ago, but costs keep going up.
The Telegraph: continue reading
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